


Connection

by wheel_pen



Series: Darkwood Eastport [18]
Category: Lie to Me (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Magic, Polygamy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 01:36:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3631743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-Eastport. Cal, away at college in Sweden, feels an inexplicable longing to come home to the Valley, where as his mother’s favorite he’s expected to stay unmarried by her side for life. However, upon arrival he meets the young woman his parents are sponsoring, and everything changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Connection

**Author's Note:**

> The bad words are censored; that’s just how I do things. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play in this universe. I’ve given a lot of thought to the Darkwood culture, so if something seems confusing, feel free to ask. I hope you enjoy!

Something was tugging him back home.

He had never been particularly prone to homesickness. He loved to travel, the more exotic the better. A lot of people thought that he came from the most exotic place of all—some didn’t even believe it existed—but for him it was mundane, predictable, confined. His life was laid out for him there already, and while he knew it would be a worthwhile life, helping other people work through their traumas brought on by life somewhere else—he still wanted to travel to those somewhere elses first.

But now something was tugging him home.

He realized the sensation had been creeping up on him for months, maybe longer. It had never happened before and he couldn’t explain it, no matter how closely he analyzed it. His professor just laughed when he told him about it. “Cal, you’re just homesick! I would be too if I came from a place like that. Go home over the summer break. You’ve got plenty of credits built up.”

Well, he didn’t believe that’s what it was. But the feeling existed nonetheless, and in the end he decided the best way to investigate it would be to follow the tugging, like an explorer following his rope back through the dark cave. Only in this case, he didn’t know what would be waiting for him at the end.

Or was it the beginning?

It was easy to get home, and yet not so easy. He could open his closet door and step into his parents’ living room if he wanted, but his father would call that a waste of energy and the Council wouldn’t like it much, either. So instead he took an airplane, then a train, then a bus, then a hired car down to a deserted harbor pier, and he sat down to wait. A couple other people joined him, stragglers from elsewhere in the world too—they had never met before but they were all brothers, of course, being from the same country and having traveled so long to get back to it.

Finally the ship came—rolling out of the fog on the grey sea, the gleaming white sail bearing the unmistakable black tree. This was not an age of wooden sailing ships, elegant, majestic, graceful, agile; it was an age of steel tankers, rusty, bulky, ungainly, blunt. But in Darkwood you could have any age, and that of elegant ships was preferred.

“You—you, Darkwood folk,” said one of the locals in the tiny seaport village, a tough old bird with a face like a withered apple. “Take these two with you, then.” She pushed two children forward, the boy tall and gangly, the girl pale and trembling.

Three coats immediately came off; the girl got two wrapped around her thin frame and could hardly bear it. “Have you any documents for them?” Cal asked professionally. Seeing that he knew what he was doing, the other two men plied the children with snacks and pointed out the approaching ship.

The woman spit on the ground, not as an expression of contempt, Cal saw, but simply because she felt the need to spit. “No papers,” she shrugged. “My niece and nephew. Their mother’s dead. Got enough mouths to feed already.”

Cal nodded. “We’ll take them. Want to get rid of anymore?” he added, a bit cheekily.

The woman wiped her nose on her hand. “What’s the age limit?”

“Fourteen, or twenty-five subject to review.”

“Maybe next time,” she decided thoughtfully, and trundled away.

This happened to Cal a lot. To all Darkwood people who traveled beyond the Valley, really, at least in places where people told their tales—and believed them. This little village was a frequent transit point in this modern era; as such, it had few if any orphaned and abandoned children. It was nice to be able to help.

Cal, the two other men, and the children boarded the ship when it arrived. There was a slight delay as the crew took the opportunity to exchange a few Darkwood goods for some barrels of salted mackerel, a staple of nauseating commonness in the village but a rare delicacy in the Valley. The village usually made out better in the trade, but that was fine. They could use all the triticale and thick black woven wool they could get, anyway.

The voyage across the ocean didn’t take long. It didn’t _have_ to take long at all, really, but it seemed like the longer it took, the easier it was. And it definitely went faster if you weren’t watching it, so Cal laid down for a nap in his bunk. He dreamed of home, but in a strange way, not of familiar places but rather of those he’d only been to a few times—the woods, the gardens. He wasn’t much of an outdoor person—oh, he’d spent a lot of time out of doors on his travels, it didn’t bother him, but he didn’t do it for the beauty or solitude of nature. He just did it because that was how the people he was with lived. But now, he dreamed of the woods, and of white lilies in a garden.

The chime woke him and he realized that, of course, they had reached the Valley. Cal wandered up on deck to take in the landscape, such as it was. The woods on one side, the river turning into the lake in front of them, the river racing mysteriously from the blackness of the cave mouth behind them. And to the other side, the great house, set beyond the open grass and small garden plots. There was no building like it in the world, so huge and monolithic, stretching away into the distance on either side, an entire world under one roof. But well-managed—that was what his father always said. There was no noise or confusion at the piers, no crowds pushing and shouting as in the great port cities. Just a small, patient group, waiting to welcome the travelers and take care of the new arrivals.

He’d told them he was coming. If no one had been there at all he would have thought his letter had gotten lost—not an unlikely possibility, really—but Alice waved at him from the shore, so he knew the message had gotten through. Well, that was her good fortune; after they had embraced in greeting, Cal opened up his luggage right there on the grass beside the river and let her have her pick of the gifts he’d brought back—colorful scarves, perfume, jewelry. All these things were available in the Valley, but not in these patterns, scents, styles. Alice would be the envy of all her friends, not that she cared at all about that—probably why she was Cal’s favorite sister.

“And here, this is for the kids,” he said, handing her a long, flat cardboard box. “It’s a new board game. It’s all the rage in Sweden. Sorry I couldn’t bring more,” he told her, because he was. He liked her children, his nieces and nephews. But he’d already lugged several heavy bags through multiple modes of transportation; there was a limit to how much he could bring back since he wasn’t allowed to use the magic bag. And the post was too unreliable for packages.

“Oh, that’s alright,” Alice told him, and he could see that it really was. “You must come ‘round and teach them to play it!”

“I will,” he promised, watching the servants pack his bags back up. “So how’s Dad and Mum and everyone?”

“Fine, of course,” Alice assured him, as if it could ever be otherwise. “They’re chaperoning a Match Dance tonight. Mum said you should drop by and see them when you got in.”

Cal snorted a little at that. A few years ago his mother wouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near a Match Dance, especially after the debacle with Zoe. Clearly being in a room full of single young people looking for love was too much temptation for him. But by now, it seemed, she felt he’d accepted his destiny.

He didn’t know about _accepted_ , really; but he did feel, recently, like a certain weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Even his non-Darkwood friends at school spent so much of their time worrying about relationships—finding them, maintaining them, ending them. In recent months he’d noticed that he just didn’t care about that anymore, and it was a relief to him, to just shrug and say that he wasn’t attracted to some women, that he wasn’t lonely at night, that he didn’t miss having children of his own—and have it be true. So much less to worry about, to distract him from his work. Except at the same time had come this longing to come home—so maybe it _was_ acceptance, maybe it all went together.

He tried to glance around the landscape in the gathering twilight, seeing the woods and the lake and the meadow with fresh eyes—this would be his home forever, this little corner of the world, so well-insulated from the rest of the universe that you couldn’t even see the stars at night. The idea made his throat constrict, his stomach roil. Well, no one ever said the road to acceptance was short.

“Cal?” Alice prompted. “You goin’ to meet them at the dance, then?”

He snapped out of it. “Yeah, I’ll go. I think I’ll take a quick shower first.” He’d been traveling a lot lately, and the showers on the boat were always cramped.

His clean-up didn’t take long; the servants had zipped him straight from the riverside to his room, no need to actually _walk_ to the building or try to find his parents’ apartment in the maze of doors and corridors. It would probably have been impossible to do on his own anyway. He had his own room and bathroom now, to focus on the positive—everything was exactly as he’d left it after his last visit, except clean. No more sharing, no more looking for things other people had moved—he wouldn’t have to give up that little luxury when he came back here permanently. Which was good, as he’d gotten to quite enjoy his one-bedroom apartment near Stockholm. Yet somehow this thought made him uneasy instead of tranquil, and he hurried through showering and dressing, suddenly anxious to get to the dance. To see his parents.

His hair was still damp when he was deposited at the doorway of the dancehall. The servant didn’t even blink before opening the door for him; this was a singles-only Match Dance, full of gawky teenagers looking for their first spouse, someone to sit by for the long years of Marriage Prep class, someone to forge a strong bond with that their entire clan would rest upon. A lot of first sons and second daughters, with a few adopted and sponsored girls thrown in for variety.

Those that weren’t busy goggling at each other, or gazing timidly at their own shoes, stared at Cal as he stalked past on the sidelines—he was at least five years older than any of them, not to mention underdressed and slightly unkempt. He hadn’t been polished to perfection by his parents and put out on display like they had, and though usually he counted this as a mark of his superiority over them—to be beyond such play-acting—at this very moment he felt incredibly self-conscious. His walk, the rolling gait of a sailor since he could toddle, stiffened even further.

Finally he saw his father up ahead. Servants were the best chaperons, of course, but it had been found that real adults were pretty good as well, and less intrusive—you needed a _little_ give in the behavioral restrictions, after all, to find out if you really liked someone. And the adults were better at addressing the emotions of the young dancers anyway, or at least of explaining them to others, like a youngster’s parents. So the center of the room was filled with teenagers and the margins were patrolled by adults, and Cal really fell into neither category these days.

“Cal!” He and his father embraced warmly.

“Dad. Hey, I brought you some coffee,” Cal told him. “The kind in the blue and yellow bag you liked last time.” There was an unlimited amount of coffee in the Valley, but it was available in only two different roasts. To Cal’s father, a sailor who had sampled brews in every port, this was a torturous monotony.

“Oh, that’s _great_ ,” Franco replied, with perhaps more enthusiasm than coffee really should have warranted. “How many bags?” Cal held up four fingers. His clothing would smell like that coffee for days, but his father was so easy to please in that respect. Franco clapped him on the back in delight. “Good lad! Glad you’re home. Have you seen your mother yet?”

Cal turned to look through the adolescent dancers, scanning the other side of the room. “No, I haven’t—“

And then he saw her. Not his mother—at that moment he didn’t even remember his mother’s _name_ , or his own for that matter. Every ounce of his being, his memory, his senses, had been captured by _her_ , like light being wrenched into a black hole, warping against the curve of space as it resisted its natural path under the pull of such inescapable gravity. So strong was his reaction that at first he didn’t even see her clearly, this flame to which he was drawn, just an orange blur that he stumbled towards. His focus sharpened suddenly and he saw the orange dress, the fair skin, the blue eyes that tugged him, that had tugged him from outside the Valley, that had pulled him back here as surely as the North Pole tugged a compass needle. Later he understood why he had stopped worrying about women, because he had one of his own—his first one, the one he would set above all others—though he hadn’t known it at the time.

He didn’t clearly remember what happened next. His mother said he’d made a ‘scene’—she tended to exaggerate, but her shame was real. Cal didn’t care, though. He didn’t care about any of the emotions crossing her face—shame, anger, disappointment, fear. He just wanted to know more about the girl—and his parents couldn’t shut him down with ‘I don’t know,’ because they were her sponsors, she was _living_ with them, with him technically, and that thought made him so giddy he almost missed her name.

“What was that? What?”

“ _Gillian_ , I said _Gillian_. Are you ill?”

He wasn’t ill. But he would never be the same again.


End file.
